


Some Things You can do One-Handed, in the Dark

by OwnThyself



Series: Shatter and Stay [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cryogenics, Hurt/Comfort, Husbands, Kissing, M/M, POV Steve Rogers, Poetry, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Stucky - Freeform, Waiting, Wakanda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 14:59:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6961777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OwnThyself/pseuds/OwnThyself
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remember the cold, Rogers, he tells himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Things You can do One-Handed, in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarkAstarte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/gifts).



Steve reads, the first week.

The library Okoye leads him to is vast. For only the first time that morning, he reaches behind his back for the shield, fingers curling then releasing around nothing. It’s an impulse, he tells himself. The easiest part is supposed to be the freefall.

Okoye isn’t sympathetic to his ghost reflexes, even though he knows she registers them. He pauses under a sheaf of light in the natural history corridors, hefts a tome on wild plants loose, along with its English translation in smaller, unobtrusive typeface. She’s given him the run of any library he likes, and in his quarters there are epic ballads, war reports, topographic studies, dystopian fictions and a slim, battered volume of 19th century love poems.

Steve mouths the names of poisonous bromeliads. He learns the name of a vine creeper so thick it reaches the width of a jaguar’s leap from ground to carcass. He stands there with both books balanced in his arms, Wakandan to English, while Okoye keeps watch. There’s nothing against which he needs defending, he thinks, but he understands the lines of vigilance in her spine. He doesn’t need her to tell him what she’s guarding against.

The answer is everything.

He nods at her gratefully when she motions to him to take the books back to his quarters. This is the seventh day he’s waited, and this is the seventh book he’s taking. One per day seems like a fair trade. A fair price to pay, though he doesn’t know whom he’s paying, and he’s pretty sure nothing’s expected of him here. Still, Steve is accustomed to the careful sums of balance, and he doesn’t like taking more than he should.

He spends the walk back to his quarters trying to decide whether that’s true, Okoye’s booted footfall keeping step with his own. Her mouth thins as they stride past the royal mediation chambers. A familiar, measured voice echoes at an uncommon pitch of anger, its Oxford-accented Xhosan thick and tinged with helplessness. The voice that responds is a crescendo of high clicks, each ejected from the throat with force and matching fury. There is no measure to the weight of its fall, careless and clotted up with rage.

“The Azanian high ambassador,” Okoye offers through gritted teeth, her own hands reaching and closing around nothing. This time, Steve looks away.

“What kind of war’s coming?” he asks, because he knows better than to waste words with her. Because she lets him take the books he needs to mark the time by, and he doesn’t want to insult her measured kindness. 

“The one we thought we could avoid, Captain Rogers.”

***

It isn’t the natural history tome he takes when he goes walking that night. Steve slips the poems into his jacket, heads for the cliff overlooking the outlying village. Red dirt crumbles under his shoes, and if the cold got to the core of him the way it did with ordinary men, he knew he’d be cold. He knew he should feel the cold.

Remember the cold, Rogers, he tells himself, skirting the cliff edge, loose pebbles skittering off the precipice as he scouts close to the lip of the outcrop as he can. From here, the jungle beckons, wild and alive as any god with a world to lose or salvage. Steve reaches past the phone full of unanswered texts, shakes the poetry book out and opens it to the dead centre. Remember what it was like to be huddled into a corner of the wharf, too cold to shiver, too cold to do anything more than stand so still and hope the stasis of your small, improbable body would generate heat, while you waited. Waited for the boy to unsnake himself loose from the business end of the pier – because he said wait, because you listened to no one else but you’d listen to him on the coldest nights when you knew all he was doing was trying to feed you right – while you waited for that boy to come on back to you with rations he’d stolen or sweet-talked his way into, or maybe both since you never knew and you never asked.

He’d throw his arm around you and walk you to the edge of something very much like this edge, and you’d go, you’d go, you’d lean into him and go without questioning why—

Steve stops short, dry earth pitching from under his boots as he half-skids. He steadies himself by standing upright, looks over into the green heart of the wild. He looks as far as he can over T’Challa’s land, clocks the border of Azania well past the mountain promontories over which men with more gods in their arsenal than Steve have fought. A war is coming, according to Okoye. A war is always on the horizon, no matter which country in which you find yourself waiting.

The book is already open to the place he needs. He reads the English out loud, and with every line his eyes glance to the source words in isiXhosa.

_The moon has ascended between us,_  
_Between two pines_  
_That bow to each other;_

_Love with the moon has ascended,_  
_Has fed on our solitary stems;_

_And we are now shadows_  
_That cling to each other,_  
_But kiss the air only._

Steve tells himself he’ll bring a different book to this spot, same time tomorrow. He tastes the unspoken lie sticking to his soft palate as he walks back to the palace, and makes plans to cancel his cell service tomorrow, too. Sam knows how to reach him without a phone. Everyone else is taken care of, silent, or busy scanning their own horizons.

***

“You can walk yourself to the library today,” Okoye tells him with something dangerously resembling a smile. They’ve worked out a system—a kind of royal library loan and return policy. Both of them know it’s a diversion to pass the impatience that swells in the calm before certain war. The boardrooms are empty. Every last mediation has dried up. Steve thinks of the Sokovia Accords, and wonders again what there’s left to assemble.

He kneels in the stacks and tries to catalogue with the tips of his fingers every book he’s touched since he’s been here. He can’t remember the last time he reached for the invisible shield behind his back. No dust is allowed to settle in these halls, but something dances in the air here, all the same – particulate and captive to the light – resting on everything with weight, resounding in the spine of every vessel of cultural heft and form. Steve wonders if history has a molecular structure. The friends he’d ask are silent or scanning their own horizons. He stays kneeling long after Okoye’s left for her war council, and tries to map the shape of the history under his hands using nothing but the one power he was born knowing, long before the impulse to throw a punch ever came in a backalley or boardwalk. He stays still and waits.

“Too Catholic for your own good, genuflecting in plain sight,” Bucky says.

Steve looks deeper into the books strewn at his feet. He hasn’t asked for Bucky within this hour, has he? He’s tried to ration the insistence of his prayers. This is war time, after all. He knows better than to live off the hungry saints of his own, his only needs. He grips his own knees, tries to take the measure of a pulse that has forgotten how to be cold. It comes up steady. Steady as ghosts, Rogers. Steady as a lindy hop during an air raid.

“Steve.”

He decides that history does have a molecular structure, after all. He looks up to see the light dividing right in front his eyes. Steve blinks. He can’t open his eyes. He can’t do anything at all but stay very, very still.

There’s a thud, hollow but decisive, like a body relearning its center of gravity. There is weight on the floor of the royal library in the fall of a pair of knees joining his.

Steve’s fingers clutch around empty air, short-circuiting for the lack of a shield to grip or a protocol to enforce or a blow to deflect. He shivers as a hand closes around his, closer than ghosts, now. Steadier than bombs falling in the openmouthed crater of Sokovia or Lagos or straight into the fire-escape bedroom window where two boys from Red Hook curated the scars on each other’s knees with the first aid kits of their tongues and Hail Marys.

“Holy Mary—” Steve sobs, but Bucky doesn’t let him get any further. He swallows the whimper, bites it clean into his mouth and chases it down the well of Steve’s throat, his hand shifting from wrists to nape. There’s an absence of bionic metal between both men, no whirring circuitry, no plates shifting into place between punches and the partitioning of titanium alloy between the teeth of a knife. There are no more mechanics but the beating of Bucky’s heart, meeting Steve’s.

There are too many things to say, sprawled and scrambling to be closer. Steve tastes the coppery give of an incisor tug, licks his own blood into Bucky’s lips then chases it with a stifled shout of joy and fear, every part of him undefended and open to the ransack. There are too many places to start. He wraps one arm around Bucky’s waist and hauls him mostly upright, weeping and laughing into the crook of shoulder built in Brooklyn, dismantled in Russia, reassembled in Wakanda. Who says love isn’t its own multinational accord?

“Pal, you’re gonna split your ribs, you keep laughing like that,” Bucky grins into his hair, petting him like he’s a hundred pounds wet, hoisting him like he weighs twice that and more. Some things you can do one handed, in the dark, Steve thinks, gripping waist and back and sides and every part of the man he shivered under every pier for, every part of the man in whose dirtymouthed, surefooted honour he first learned to throw a punch.

“About time you woke up, Buck,” Steve gasps, tearing up from the molecular history all around them. “We’ve got a war to fight.”

**Author's Note:**

> The poem Steve reads at the edge of the cliff is postcolonial Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo's "Love Apart".


End file.
